Water

On Sunday Buck and I went down to Long Beach with Zac to celebrate his last weekend in Cali before he heads off to do super smart stuff at Harvard. We had dinner with one of Zac’s long time buddies, Luke, and his girlfriend, Jessica, who are both doing neat stuff here in LA. Luke is a film maker and made a really beautiful spot for Patagonia. Check it out: Our Common Waters

From their site, I visited the National Geographic Water Calculator page and took their water survey to find out how much water I am using per day. At the end I made a pledge to reduce my water consumption by 116 gallons per day, which is 12% of my consumption, by doing the following:

Reducing the time I spend in the shower to 5 minutes (I think I’ll put a timer in the bathroom to help)

Only running the dishwasher 4 times per week (using the dishwasher uses about 10 gallons per load; hand washing uses 20 gallons!)

Don’t flush for pee (Buck gets totally grossed out by this, but he’ll need to get over it. Luckily, our toilet was just replaced with a low flow one, so we are ahead of the game on that! Each flush in a regular toilet uses 2 gallons of water, whereas a low flow toilet only uses 1.5 gallons)

Drive less (we’re already doing pretty well with only one car and we take the shoddy LA public transit as much as possible, but it’s still not great)